Clay Johnson and Andrew Campbell

Congratulations to Litoralis for correctly guessing the answer to yesterday's photo quiz. The two boys in the picture are indeed the American sailors Clay Johnson and Andrew Campbell, both born in 1984.

The photo was originally published in the Summer 1987 edition of the E-Scow class newsletter, the Reporter. (It's on page 11.) Andrew and Clay's parents were very active in the E-Scow Class back then and only lived a few blocks away from each other in Toms River, New Jersey. I suspect the fact that Andrew's mother was the class secretary and treasurer and publication business manager had something to do with how this family vacation photo ended up in the newsletter. Andrew's family later moved to San Diego. Thanks to Baydog for originally sending me a copy of this newsletter.

After successful college sailing careers (Andrew at Georgetown, Clay at Harvard) both young men campaigned to compete in the Laser class in the Olympics for the USA. In the trials for the Laser slot at the 2008 Olympics, Andrew won and Clay was third, so Andrew sailed for his country in China. For the 2012 Olympics, Clay returned to the fray and was thought by many observers, including me, to be the clear favorite to win the Laser trials and go to Weymouth. But an amazing performance by Rob Crane on the last day of the Worlds in Perth (part of the US qualification system in this cycle) gave Rob the Olympic place.

Both Andrew and Clay have been mentioned before on this blog.

I wrote quite a lot about the 2008 Olympic campaign, but this photo of Andrew was in my more recent post Damn You Andrew Campbell.



I've also written several posts about Clay. This photo of him was published in the post encouraging you to Vote for Clay Johnson as the US Olympic Committee's Male Athlete of the Month.



Thanks to everyone who had a go at the quiz. Hope you enjoyed it.

Photo Quiz

Today's quiz. Who are these two cute little guys?

Sorry about the quality of this image, but that may by itself be a bit of a clue to its vintage. If nobody gets the answer right within a day or so. I will start posting clues.

Update Tues 28 Feb: As suspected this is a tough quiz without more information. So here are some hints...

1. This is a LASER sailing blog. These two kids became well known as Laser sailors, but one of them is more active today in another class.

2. They are NOT brothers.

3. They both have sailing blogs and both have been mentioned before on this blog.

Notes from Cabarete

I took a lot of notes when I attended the clinic at the Laser Center in Cabarete last month. Unfortunately, my handwriting is quite bad and now I can't read most of my notes.  Here are the ones I can decipher...

Mmmmm. Velero breakfast.

Mark vang.

The easiest way to derig a Laser is to take out the whole rig (mast, sail and boom with vang still rigged) and put it into a specially designed rack.

The fish and chips at Jose O'Shea's is a lot better than the bangers and mash at Jose O'Shea's.

Trim, trim, trim, pump, flatten.

An even easier way to derig a Laser is to look old or helpless or tired (or female) until one of the helpful young men working at the Laser Center offers to carry your rig to the specially designed rack.

Shrimp a la Papi is to die for.

High, looser, looser, looser.

It's easier than you think to break your ridiculously expensive carbon fiber tiller extension, even on the land.

Honeys and mamas.

Two up, one forward.

It's easier than you think to buy a new ridiculously expensive carbon fiber tiller extension in Cabarete to replace the one you broke.

No socks.

More duct tape.

Nice regatta awards. Must win one next time.

Gaaaarrrgh.

Marine Animals and Bikinis on Friday

You don't want to read my utter nonsense every day, so today I'm sharing some link love with three other bloggers who write much more interesting stuff than you can find on this blog.


First up is Tim Zimmermann who has been blogging up a storm this week with posts on everything from test-tube meat to Henry Miller's advice on writing. But the post that really hit me hard between the eyes was about the problems caused by illegal driftnet fishing in the Mediterranean, Driftnet Destruction. Warning: if you are of a sensitive disposition, be aware there are some very sad pictures of beautiful sea creatures in awful distress in this article.


More cheerful, even playful, in mood is @ the beach on Noodles logbook. Noodle isn't a real person. Well, are any of us bloggers real people? But Noodle is even less real than the rest of us as she is only a character in the virtual reality world, Second Life. She (of course she may not be a she in real life) tells us, "I met this guy. Nice guy. Sailor. We talked boats and stuff. Eventually he said: I kinda like your blog. It's very boatly, but how come you never take pics like Alex and Taru, you know... swimsuits and stuff. I told him it is a boat blog, not a skin blog."

LOL. "Not a skin blog." I like that. Anyway Noodle posted a series of pictures of her in a bikini (and sometimes in only half a bikini) that was eerily reminiscent of a series on Taru's blog.

I hope the guy she met likes her pictures. My theory is that Noodle is really some grizzled old male Danish keelboat sailor about my age. If so, he looks damn good in a bikini.


Finally, I have to mention Cabarete Dreamin: Part One on Center of Effort. The author of this blog is apparently one of those awful paparazzi who seems to have captured a photo of me in Cabarete hanging out in a bar with not one but two beautiful women, and somehow linked me with a photo of Ursula Andress in a bikini. It gets even worse because this scurrilous article puts words in my mouth that sound like they belong in one of those tabloid rags you find by the checkout at the supermarket (not that I ever look at such publications you understand.) Who is the person writing this stuff? And can I dare hope that there won't be even worse "revelations" about me in parts 2 and 3 of this series?

Sailor's Tan

Mástil Roto

Four Ways to Become a Pinball Wizard

How do you get in the zone? How do you achieve that Zen-like feeling of intense absorption in an activity in which you seem to lose all sense of time and you are able to perform at the top of your game?

It certainly happens in sailing. I suspect that top sailors are "in the zone" most of the time. For a duffer like me it only seems to happen a few times a year. There was the first race at Quannapowitt YC last October when I just seemed to be picking up the shifts and puffs naturally and pulling out ahead of the fleet without any particular effort. There was the last race on Friday at Hyannis when something clicked and I was sailing so fast downwind I wasn't even anxious about capsizing any more. And there was the last race at Buzzards Bay in 2008 when I almost felt like I was having a Cannabinoid Moment.

I know it when I feel it. But how do you get into the zone?

There was an interesting article on this topic earlier this month in New Scientist - Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus.

The article discusses several methods to achieving that state of high performance "flow" at any game.

1. 10,000 hours
First there's the advice that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become expert in any discipline. "Over that time, your brain knits together a wealth of new circuits that eventually allow you to execute the skill automatically, without consciously considering each action." Yarg told us all about that back in 2009.

2. Seams
Then there's the idea that you should concentrate on some external focus, like the seam on the ball for a tennis player or the water's movement around your limbs for a swimmer. The idea is to distract the conscious mind from thinking about your own performance. I wrote about this a couple of years ago at Seams.

3. Neurofeedback
The New Scientist article then describes how scientists have been studying what goes on inside the brain when athletes are in the zone. They have discovered what brain waves are characteristic of the flow state and have been using neurofeedback to train people into how to achieve it.

Each person is hooked up to electrodes that tease out and display specific brain waves, along with a monitor that measures their heartbeat. By controlling their breathing and learning to deliberately manipulate the waveforms on the screen in front of them, the novices managed to produce the alpha waves characteristic of the flow state.

The experiment discussed in the New Scientist article was performed on archers. Hmmm. It might be a bit tricky to hook up a Laser sailor with electrodes and a brain wave display while he's actually sailing.

4. Zap your brain
The article goes on to report on how one scientist is speeding up the process of learning to get into the zone using something called "transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)" which is basically a fancy way of saying "give your brain electric shocks." There's even a growing community of DIY types who are experimenting with tDCS at home. Scary! And probably also not practical on a Laser.

What do you think?

Do you have any other suggestions?

Oh, I have to explain the title of this post. This morning while I was thinking about how to write a post on this topic, the radio started playing Pinball Wizard by The Who. And I realized that this is probably the best song ever written about being in the zone while playing a game. Enjoy!

He ain't got no distractions

Can't hear those buzzers and bells,

Don't see lights a flashin'

Plays by sense of smell.

Always has a replay,

'N' never tilts at all

That deaf dumb and blind kid

Sure plays a mean pin ball.

Captcha

Some of my old friends have been complaining recently that they are finding it hard to read those verification words that you have to type in to publish a comment. Those words are examples of a CAPTCHA which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. And that's the point. It's to prevent robots from filling up our comments with spam.

Anything which poses a problem that humans can easily solve but which standard automated software does not recognize can be used as a captcha. Maybe the robots are getting smarter because it seems that Google has recently made the captchas used in Blogger somewhat harder to read. Especially so for my old friends it seems.

I wonder if they would prefer a captcha like this...

And they should certainly be grateful I don't use a captcha like this...

Happy Birthday

This blog is seven years old today.

What do you get a blog for its birthday?

Seriously. The kid is growing up fast. She deserves a present. What shall I give her?

Two Things about the New England Boat Show

On Monday, three friends and I headed into Boston to check out the New England Boat Show.

After a slightly alcoholic lunchtime diversion (more on that at the end of the post) we hung a right after entering the show and headed for the section with sailboats. As we are all Laser sailors we were eager to see if any of the manufacturers represented at the show had come up with a boat better than a Laser. I mean it's been over 40 years now. Surely somebody has invented a better boat.

There were dinghies of all descriptions and catamarans and trimarans. There were even a lot of those sailboats that you can sleep on and poop in if that's what takes your fancy. I've never really been much into pooping in boats but my friends were eager to take off their shoes and disappear inside some of the boats you can poop in. When they emerged I would ask them, "So what are The Two Things I need to know about this boat?" They would look puzzled (I often seem to have this effect on people) and then they would answer something like, "The V-berth is small and the cockpit is big," or "It's got nice curtains and a shiny wheel." I really don't remember all the replies.

Anyway after a while it was unanimously agreed that none of the sailing boats at the show were better than Lasers (even if you could poop in many of them) and off we went to play with the model boats on the Remote Control Sailing Pond. I must admit I was pretty good at steering the RC boat around the race course but my friends did their best to embarrass me. They were awful. The helpful man running the stand had to keep running over and rescuing their boat after they had lost control and done the RC equivalent of going aground aka trying to make the boat jump out of the pool. After one of our party (who shall be nameless) managed to T-bone the other RC yacht on the pond in a blatant port-starboard foul, the helpful man running the stand's face turned a shade of beetroot red and he started babbling hysterically about it's not bumper boats so we decided to move on before he had us evicted from the show. Hey, it was nothing that you couldn't fix with duct tape.

So then we wandered around the rest of the show which was given over to powerboats. Being an anal-retentive type I insisted that the party stick to a mathematically efficient grid pattern so we didn't miss anything. We sneered at the jetskis. We debated what kind of boat we would choose as a Mommy Boat (if we weren't passionately opposed to Mommy Boats which of course we all are.) We fantasized about owning a cruising motorboat which was large enough to carry a Laser onboard so that we could travel to Laser regattas in it, maybe even to Florida.

After an hour or so of kicking the tires (metaphorically speaking) on powerboats and taking our shoes off and putting our shoes on more times than I can recall, we kind of lost sight of our original objective and decided that if we were going to go over to the dark side we might as well really go for it and unanimously decided that the right powerboat for us was some monstrosity that was longer than my house. Personally I liked it because it had a flat screen TV in the owner's stateroom because I always like to watch TV while I am sleeping. Unfortunately, in this sector of the market you don't get a flat screen TV in the head so you can't watch TV while you are pooping. I was also impressed with the explanation of the helpful man on the stand that you could steer it with a joystick thingie which made it all seem very easy and would probably avoid a recurrence of that unfortunate collision with the fuel dock in Stamford. (It didn't actually explode. Well, not much.)

Anyway the object of our desires cost about 700 grand and we worked out it would cost about half my yearly income in gas to drive it to Florida and back. I tried to explain to my friends that if we split all the costs four ways it wouldn't sound so bad but they weren't convinced. I guess, in spite of our momentary delusions, we really aren't part of the 1%. Mitt Romney probably buys a boat like this for each of his kids as an Xmas present. Do Mormons do Xmas?

Where was I? Where am I? Oh yes, South Boston with aching feet.

So, by following my anal-retentive grid we eventually stumbled into the corner of the show that was hosting the Powerboat Docking Challenge. After challenging all my friends to have a go at this, I quickly sidestepped over to the Old Charts of New England stand. For me this was the highlight of the show. They had some fascinating old charts of all the coastal areas around here, many from the US Coastal Survey and some from private chart makers going back to the early 1800s. My son bought me an 1861 chart of Mount Hope Bay (aka My Bay) when we moved into our current house and I think some of the charts on this stand would make wonderful presents for certain people I know.

My friends didn't seem to want to talk about how well they did in the Powerboat Docking Challenge. Apparently none of them had won. So we wandered over to find one of the friends who had sailed with us in Cabarete in January who was working a stand at the show for his business. He seemed pleased to see us and we passed a pleasant hour reminiscing about Cabarete and all the amazing experiences we had had there which seemed even more exciting and scary and dangerous the more we talked about them.

By then it was time for dinner so we found an Irish pub where bangers and mash was on the menu. I have to say that Boston does Irish pubs better than the Dominican Republic does. Who would have thunk it?

So what are the two things I will remember about  our day out at the 2012 New England Boat Show?

The first will be that one of our group gave his details to the helpful man running the stand for the Massachusetts State Treasurer's Office who was offering a service to find unclaimed property and within a few seconds the helpful man had found some forgotten stocks that would have been enough to buy two Lasers or the flat screen TV in the owner's stateroom on the boat longer than my house.

The second will be what we did before the show. A few weeks ago I met the owner of Eastside Wines and Market in South Boston. He explained to me that the secret of his business is to find wines that overperform and are undervalued. I told him I planned to swing by his wine store before going to the show and he laid on a wine tasting for our little group. Wow! What a revelation! I tasted wines that I had never heard of before and bought a few bottles. This place is a hidden gem. If you are going to the Boat Show this weekend, or are in the area for other reasons, be sure to swing by Eastside Wines at 474 East 8th Street. You won't be disappointed.

I think I'll take a nap now and watch some TV.